The Contours of Red Scare Politics, 1935–1945

Abstract

The conspicuous roles in the Bay State’s history of evangelical reformers and civil libertarians, of Radical Republicans and Progressives, and, more recently, of liberal Democrats and Republicans, have sometimes perhaps served to obscure the antiradical actors who have also strutted across its stage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indeed, a rather conservative brand of Republicanism dominated the politics of the state, although as the Democratic party began to win statewide elections more moderate Republicans came to displace the diehards. In Massachusetts though, Democrats could be conservatives too, and a reactionary patriotism could seize the state whichever party was in the ascendancy. Massachusetts participated in the Red Scare alarums of 1919, but it was in the 1930s that the contours of the state’s anticommunism were fully revealed. In these years some of the lasting tensions in the state’s political culture were exposed by the Communist issue; loose alliances were precipitated that were to re-emerge during the Cold War era, and the anticommunists fashioned weapons that they nursed for decades to come. Massachusetts could even be said to have been in the vanguard of red scare politics, because it proposed an elaborate communist-control programme even before Congress moved into the area with the Smith Act.